Early on in her pregnancy, Darlene Hensch felt awful. She said her pregnancy symptoms were significantly worse than when she carried her daughter.
“I started feeling really sick right away, just nauseous all the time and just really exaggerated pregnancy symptoms,” she said.
She’s now six months pregnant with quadruplets: three boys and one girl. When she found out, she was in shock.
“I didn’t know how to handle it,” Hensch said.
“I was just overcome with emotion and a bit hysterical.”
Hensch is from Westlock County and travels a couple of times a month to Edmonton to visit a high-risk pregnancy clinic.
She will deliver at the Royal Alexandra Hospital when she is 32 to 34 weeks pregnant via C-section with a high-risk team on standby.
Hensch also has a three-year-old daughter, but her story is significantly different than that of her soon-to-be siblings.
Her parents tried to conceive for eight years, going through multiple rounds of fertility treatment.
“It was a really long road,” she said. “I was diagnosed with unexplained infertility, and a low ovarian reserve.
“I thought I would have one kid and that would be it. Surprise!”
She calls the quadruplets’ conception a miracle.
“When I was going through the fertility clinic they did give a medication that helps you ovulate. I tried that multiple months. It was never successful,” she said, speaking about when she had her daughter.
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“This time I tried again and it worked way too well.”
Hensch won’t be alone in her journey. Early in her pregnancy she got in touch with the Edmonton Twin and Triplet club, who connected her with Tara Watson.
Watson and her husband welcomed their quadruplets in 2024.
“We don’t have a huge community of women who have quadruplets in Canada,” Watson said.
“I was excited to have someone nearby because you can’t just get up and go travel to the States every time you wanna go talk to another quad mom.”
Watson has been able to find a community of moms online who have quadruplets.
It’s been a way to get support and advice from those who truly understand. Now, she hopes to be a part of that support system for Hensch, as she prepares to become a mom of five.
“Having higher order multiples is very different than having many kids,” Watson said.
“It’s such an amazing club to be part of and I’m just really looking for her to experience that magic and holding them all for the first time and, yeah, she’s in for a really special, special journey.”
“She didn’t hide anything,” Hensch said of the first conversation she had with Waston.
“She told me absolutely everything — this is what you should expect, the good, the bad, the ugly — and I’ve used that as a base for what I’m doing going forward.”
The number one piece of advice for Hensch that Watson offered was to accept help, even when it’s difficult to ask for it.
“Whether that looks like, grocery drop-offs, meal drop-off, diaper drop-offs, or picking up a baby, changing diapers, doing laundry, all of the things — she’s going to need the help,” Watson said.
“I hope her community steps up big like they did for me.”
In the meantime, Hensch is preparing for her entire life to change in a few months.
“I just feel like it’s going to change me as a person, for sure,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to be who I was before this, I need to be somebody else entirely.”
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